“Be the
What Is It to
I
n the distant land of pre-coronavirus America, some congregations would take a Sunday off to “be the Church” in their community. The Divine Service was replaced with community service, with the understandable but misplaced idea that the Church is defined by what the members are doing, not by what the Lord is doing among them. For many Christians, the church is what the Church does, not whom the Lord gathers. We have now all had several and maybe many Sundays “off” from the Divine Service. Our pews were empty, our organ benches empty, our communion rails unused. Diligent pastors and diligent musicians did streaming services for us, but we knew it wasn’t the same as being there. We weren’t there hearing and singing, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. If the Church was defined by what we do, the love and kindness and generosity so many Christians have shown in the past year would have been enough for all of us. If the Church was the sum total of all our good works for the sake of others, we would have no sense of loss about the last year. There were kindnesses and joys in abundance, but there was still a lack we all sensed. There were extraordinary examples of generosity and faithfulness among our people. We wouldn’t all feel that we had lost a lot and wouldn’t all know people who have been lost to our congregations and not yet returned—not so much from fear of infection as from indifference to Christ. They did not watch the recorded service all the way through, then didn’t watch anything except the sermon, then didn’t watch more than a few minutes at the beginning, then didn’t watch at all. What happened? 10
What sustains us? What defines the Church? We know better now than we did before. It used to make some sense somehow that the Church was what the members of the church did. Some of us thought that “church” was the fruit the branches bore, the hours devoted to the community, the number of meals served, the total backpacks given away each school year. None of that fruit then or now was bad, none of it useless or pointless. None of that fruit, however, was Jesus. Never once have I preached to someone drawing near to the kingdom or near to death’s door that my congregation had given away a large number of backpacks, served a large number of meals to the homeless, or made a certain large number of evangelism contacts in the past six months. I might have those statistics in my head or in our church database, but that fruit never called anyone out of darkness into Christ’s marvelous light. No one was ever saved by the fruit we bore. When it really matters, all I have to say is that Jesus is the Good Shepherd and will see you through death into life everlasting. All I have is that Jesus died for sinners and rose for their justification. I do not preach the branches. I preach the True Vine. For the Life of the World
